On this episode of ResEdChat, join our host Noah Montague, and guest Mathew Perry, Resident Director at Miami University of Ohio, to talk about RA recruitment. RA recruitment is one of the biggest endeavors that any Residence Life department goes through. And naturally, there are always things that go well and things that can go better. Noah and Perry discuss tangible ways to better recruit RAs and make the processes more equitable for those in them.
Guest: Mathew Perry (he/they), Resident Director
Host: Noah Montague
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About ResEdChat
Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Noah Montague:
Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast, the platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about topics in residence life and college student housing. So my name is Noah Montague and I use he/him/his pronouns. And today I will be your host. As you all are starting to know as we make these episodes continuous, I like to say that I’m a storyteller by trade and the stories that I choose to tell and focus on are those that center the student and the college student experience, which makes me all the more excited about today’s topic, really talking about resident assistants and that experience a little bit more heavily.
So today we’re going to be, like I said, talking about resident assistants, community assistants, RAs, RMs, whatever acronym or term your university uses to describe the exact same thing being our student staff members living in the residence halls. But more specifically we’re going to be talking about recruitment. So RA recruitment as we know is one of, if not the biggest endeavor that most residence life offices undertake at any given year. Truly undergoing that process and talking about it and figuring out how to make it more equitable is really where we wanted to focus this conversation on today. So with that, today’s guest is a friend and a colleague who I am very excited to be introducing to you all today. I’m going to go ahead and introduce themself for y’all.
Mathew Perry:
Hello, my name is Perry. I use he/they pronouns. I am a resident director at Miami University with Noah. I work closely with one of our assistant directors as the co-chair for our RA recruitment and selection committee.
Noah Montague:
Thanks so much. I’m so excited to have you here. Perry and I were talking about-
Mathew Perry:
Very excited.
Noah Montague:
… the podcast recently and he texted me immediately and was like, “When are you having me on?”
Mathew Perry:
I’m made for this.
Noah Montague:
You are in fact made for this. So getting to do it, I am super excited, and your background with recruitment and working in that space. Just I think it’s going to make for such an interesting time to get to talk about this and kind of really delve deep into recruitment of what it looks like. So with that, I think starting with our first question then, if you could tell us a little bit about your experience working in our recruitment processes and what that has looked like for you.
Mathew Perry:
To preface, I was not an RA in undergrad. I did not work in residence life during grad school. I went through the RA recruitment process in undergrad and I left in the middle of it because I hated it. I was like, “Absolutely not. This is the worst thing ever. I’m done.” But then I got here at Miami and I was put on the RA recruitment selection committee because it was one of the only committees that actually sounded interesting to me at the time, and the co-chair at the time got a new job in October and I was just like, “Yeah, why not? Let me just go ahead and just jump in there.” So I really became the co-chair for the recruitment committee two months into my job with no training for the actual job itself and I’ve been doing it ever since. That was 2021, so I’ve been doing that ever since.
Noah Montague:
I remember when you got to Miami, that was a big thing that you suddenly took over the recruitment committee. For myself, I’ve been on our recruitment committees at a couple different schools. Now here at Miami, I’ve been on our recruitment a couple times and maybe bigger, maybe not as big. I did my internship at Virginia Tech during grad school where I actually redesigned their entire recruitment process and that was my whole internship was working with them and building that and we did a lot of different things. I was seeing it a lot of the time and at some other schools, and I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but doing different types of RAs depending on the type of hall, the type of environment they had a community RA and conduct RA-
Mathew Perry:
For different apartment complexes kind of vibe. Yes.
Noah Montague:
Different kinds of RAs across that. So I actually got to build a couple different processes and experience that difference between you all RAs versus you might be the community building RA or you might be the conduct-focused RA in that community. And that difference was really different for me as well.
Mathew Perry:
I know in my undergrad we had community assistants… We had two apartment complexes on campus. We had community assistants who ran those, but then we also had ARAs or something like that, like assistant resident assistants for the building. They were the top RA, they were the head RA and some of the other RAs reported to them before reporting to a professional staff, which was also interesting.
Noah Montague:
Definitely. I have never been at a school that has a head RA specifically within residence halls as far as full-time working. Even my undergrad didn’t have that. That wasn’t an option. So I’d be interested to see a little bit more about what that looks like at a future… Because they’re not uncommon either to have a head RA.
Mathew Perry:
No.
Noah Montague:
I actually don’t know why we don’t have them.
Mathew Perry:
Buildings are too small.
Noah Montague:
That’s a different conversation. But thinking about RA recruitment in and of itself and kind of starting a little bit broader, what have you seen as far as within that recruitment process, what kind of messaging or framing have you seen that students tend to resonate the most as far as this is going to make me apply for the job? What has that looked like for you?
Mathew Perry:
I think college students lately have been more so driven on, “How’s this going to benefit me?” They’re less driven about, “Oh, I want to do this. I am very interested in building community. I’m very interested in helping students with their first year experience.” We’ve got the RAs that are like, that’s their gist. But then we’ve also… A lot of the times we’ve got the RAs that they’re like, “How am I going to be able to put this on my resume? How is this going to help me get a job?”
And so I think that’s kind of where we’ve transitioned our marketing a little bit is these are the things you’re going to do in this job. These are the skills you’re building in this job because that’s what they want to know. They know enough about what the RA job is, but they’re just like, “How is this applicable to my future career?” So letting them know this is what you can put on a resume. You’re building community, you’re kind of managing your own little budget and stuff like that. You are leading and advocating crisis management. These are the skills you are building that you can then tell future interviews like, “Oh, through being an RA, this is what I did.”
Noah Montague:
Yeah, I think I’ve been seeing that a lot more post-COVID as well with students and not even in a bad way. Like what am I going to get out of this? The way that you’re phrasing it… I know that for me, I applied to be an RA because I had to. I would not have been able to continue going to school without doing that and it paid for me to stay a student, and depending on the institution, that’s not necessarily how we pay RAs. So figuring out what that looks like can be a little bit different, but I’m definitely seeing more and more and more what am I going to get out of this rather than I want to be there for my peers in a way that is different after COVID.
Mathew Perry:
I mean, you know, I’ve been in our [inaudible 00:08:14] program, I dropped out, whatever, moving on. But when I was applying, that’s kind what I wanted to look into was this concept of students getting in these leadership positions for the return on investment because that’s what I think is driving students more now is like, “I’m not just going to do this for fun. I’m doing this to better myself and better my career.”
Noah Montague:
And I remember when I was applying to be an RA, even back when I did that, I was told very specifically, do not mention that you are doing this in a large part for financial reasons. I remember that being a part of the advice that I received because that would turn people off to me as a candidate.
Mathew Perry:
Yeah, I think that is the craziest thing. If a candidate tells me in an interview… If I’m like, “Why do you want to be an RA?” They tell me XYZ, and then be also financial. I’m like, “Right, you’re not going to screw up the job, so why would I not hire you? You need this so you’re not going to ruin the opportunity.”
Noah Montague:
And why would I want to be paid for a job be a bad answer? I always thought that was a really interesting part of my recruitment process that I am seeing less of that mindset since we’re framing it more as this is what you’re going to be getting out of this position less so in kind of like to mirror that student perspective of what they’re actually looking for. I found that really interesting and I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve just found that really, really interesting. So I think you’ve spoken about this a little bit already, but what are maybe some effective ways… Because talking about applying, we’re talking about getting students to apply for the RA position to frame this conversation, what have you seen be the most effective ways to get students to apply for the RA position?
Mathew Perry:
Yeah, one of the newer things, not new, we used to do it earlier before I got here and last year we really kind of brought it back was having RAs hand resident recommendations. We had each RA recommend two people. We have 250 RAs, that’s 500 people that were recommending to apply for the job based off of what their RA is experiencing with them in the hall and how they are in the hall. We didn’t know how effective that would be, but we took a chance on it. The amount of, during interview week, the amount of people that brought their recommendation with them, I was just like, “This is…” So it’s worth it. It was very exciting because people are like, “Yeah, I brought my recommendation. I don’t know if you all needed this or not, but I wanted to bring it with me because it makes me feel good about the fact that I applied for this job and I’m interviewing for this job.”
Noah Montague:
What fascinating, physically tangible proof that that was helpful too. I didn’t know that happened.
Mathew Perry:
Yeah, we probably had-
Noah Montague:
That came with them.
Mathew Perry:
So we had about 300 interviews. We probably had about 20 people bring in their little recommendation that their RA gave.
Noah Montague:
That’s significant.
Mathew Perry:
Yeah. Sure, not everyone that got the recommendation applied for the job. But even I in my building, and so I have 9 RAs. We handed out 18 recommendations. I think 10 of them actually applied for the job, but then the other ones who didn’t, they like, “I very much appreciate you recommending me for the job. I am pursuing other endeavors right now though, so I don’t think this is for me.” And we’re just like, “That’s fine. If you want recommendations for those other endeavors, I see you as a student and I see you as a successful student. I’m here to be a recommendation.”
Noah Montague:
I found with that process as well, because that was going to be one of the things that I talked about in the case that you didn’t, because I watched that be so meaningful to students even if they chose not to apply and we all got to see how effective it was in the application material. But I remember I had students who we recommended and one of my RAs gave one of my students the little physical sheet, told her that she was recommended and she then came and meet with me almost in tears. I am surprised that you all see me in this way. I just thought that I was doing what I was supposed to do. I was just doing my best, but help me understand a little bit more why I was chosen to be nominated and we got to have a really cool conversation about it.
And one, I got to know that student more and she ended up getting the job. She applied, got the job all from a recommendation. She had never even considered applying before, but we nominated her partially because of that, because introverted students tend to not apply as much and she ended up getting the job. So it was just such an interesting way of going about it with those physical sheets. It was cool to see how effective they were.
Mathew Perry:
I can recommend people all day long. I have 330 residents, so am I going to know enough people out of my 330 well enough to know that they’d be able to do the job well? Probably not. I probably knew [inaudible 00:14:05] five that I would recommend myself. But putting it in the hands of the RAs who they have 20 to 30 residents, they’ve got a solid choice of people that they could recommend and they know one, who’s already applying. So I don’t necessarily need to give them a recommendation. If you don’t have anyone else, sure, go ahead, give them their recommendation, know that they’ve got your support. But they also know that student who isn’t necessarily the most vocal in the corridor but would be a good RA but maybe doesn’t have the exact confidence in themselves to apply to be a RA. And that’s what I think the recommendations can be used a little bit for is you would be good at this job. You may not believe you’d be good at this job right now, I’m telling you that you would.
Noah Montague:
And what a cool thing to hear from a peer that is actually doing the job because you shared you weren’t an RA and I was never an RA at the school that I work at. I have no idea what being an RA at Miami actually looks like because I didn’t do it. But getting to hear directly from someone in the job, we think you would be good at this. It’s cool to see how effective that has been across the board. I guess that maybe getting a little bit more deeper into the conversation, I’m thinking about the actual interview process and what that looks like. We are continuously talking about within the field, within the university, within everywhere, making sure that our processes are equitable and that students can be successful within these processes, especially as things get complicated in that sphere. What are some strategies or practices that you’ve seen that can help make the RA selection process more equitable?
Mathew Perry:
So one of the things that we do at Miami that I think a lot of the times people know we do it here but they’re just like, “It’s just something we do.” So our hiring is broken into three categories. So we score on a three point scale. The top 10% of people based off of their scores are guaranteed a job. That middle 80 is kind of like you could get the job or you’re going to be on the alternate pool. And then the bottom 10% are deemed not hireable based off of their scores. And the reason that we do this is because years past there was some notice that there may be some biases in our hiring process because people that were getting perfect scores were not getting picked up for the job. And someone gets a perfect score-
Noah Montague:
They should be hired.
Mathew Perry:
… why aren’t they getting the job? So that was a transition that we made before I got here. So this is all stuff that I have learned throughout my time doing this and why we do it and all that. But it’s really just been kind of like… Those top 10% people, they scored a 60 out of 72 most of the time. Generally they do pretty well in an interview and yes, that sometimes contribute to great interview skills. Sure. Sometimes they don’t make the best RAs but they interviewed well enough to be guaranteed a job. So we do that.
I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that I necessarily think of and I’m drawing a blank. I think that’s mainly our biggest kind of thing to keep things ethical. Other than just like here’s the script of questions, you need to make sure you stick to the script of questions. Please don’t deviate from the questions because we want to make sure everyone has the same exact thing, but that’s not new for no one.
Noah Montague:
No, not new at all. But I think that for me, and this is my sixth year working at the school, I’ve seen a lot of different ways of how we’ve done our recruitment. And at my own undergrad, seeing a lot of different ways of doing it, and some schools… I have seen Stony Brook University in my undergrad we had a group process ahead of individual processes and I found that to be a fairly difficult space, particularly when we’re talking about disability and students who maybe are not comfortable talking in groups and then perceiving, okay, you’re not comfortable in this group setting with people that you don’t know, you’re not going to be a good RA, which doesn’t really constitute anything in my professional and personal opinions.
Mathew Perry:
My undergrad, it was a group process for most of it and then there was a part of the interview and this is the part of the interview where I was like, “I’m done, I’m leaving.” They put you into a group of four and it’s that dumb, sorry if anyone loves it, but that dumb icebreaker where you build the tallest thing out of marshmallows and spaghetti and that was part of the interview process to be an RA. And I was like, “I’m out. Calling it. How is this going to tell you how I’m going to be an RA?”
Noah Montague:
I remember we had to with a big… They gave us one of those giant post-it notes. We had to plan out a program as a group of four or five people in our interview and we had to plan a program from scratch and draw the flyer for it. And I remember distinctly that being a part of the interview because there was one person, very sweet, very soft-spoken girl in my interview and she was not participating at all. I could tell how uncomfortable she was attempting to do this and a few of us who maybe were a little bit more extroverted were trying to include her in that process. And then I watched me and that other person who tried to include her get hired and not her.
I’ve thought about that every time that I think about group processes and whether or not they are a fair way of going about things, but even making processes more equitable and more fair. I’ve seen a lot of giving the candidates the questions and making sure they can all read the questions and sticking to rubrics because there are always difficulty in following a rubric at times, but I think just doing that continued training with staff I’ve watched be effective for the most part.
Mathew Perry:
We train out the wazoo about RA interviews. We do a training in the fall semester, we do a training at winter training. RAs hear it four times probably from either central staff or their supervisor. We are hounding it. We’re making sure everyone knows what they’re doing because I don’t need, and my co-person for RARS doesn’t need people calling and being like, “I think there was bias against me.” We’re doing everything we can to cut everything out. There should be absolutely nothing that you are being judged upon. We even tell people, we’re like, “If someone shows up in sweatpants, they show up in sweatpants.” We do not care. The way that they dress does not dictate how they’re going to do the job.
Noah Montague:
And that then in turn, I’ve watched that help RAs unlearn some inequitable things within their own spaces and continuing learning there too. I have one staff member who’s entering the engineering field and because of this job she learned a lot more about just because that person is not in a suit doesn’t mean they’re unprofessional. And that was something… Talk about the learning that could come out of some of the things we’re doing within that [inaudible 00:22:59].
Mathew Perry:
We’re a huge business school. We’ve got a very popular business school, so yes, do we get a lot of RAs from the business school that show up to their interviews in suits? Absolutely. Do we also have a lot of RAs who maybe show up in athletic gear and are some of the best RAs? Absolutely. It’s just professional to you could potentially not be professional to me.
Noah Montague:
And helping RAs unpack and understand that makes for a more equitable process. Yeah, I like that. That said though, thinking about the process in general and you’ve watched a lot of changes, you’ve been a part of processes, you’ve left a process in the middle of it as well, but if you could just completely scrap it, if you could scrap the interview process, if you could redesign our interview process from scratch, no limits at all, where do you think you’d start with that?
Mathew Perry:
I think it’s hard because sometimes there like… I don’t know. I think sometimes what we’re doing is great, but obviously there can always be improvements and if something could change that’s going to make it 10 times better. I think for me right now, the one thing that I wish I could change and that I have been advocating to look into changing is room set up for interviews. Right now to give context, our room setup is like we have all the tables in a perimeter. Candidates are facing the wall so they’re not echoing and not distracting other people.
That was a change that we had implemented because it used to be we were in rows. You’re basically sitting next to someone who was interviewing and that was big time distracting. Obviously we’ve got spaces for people that need accommodations for them to be in single space rooms and truthfully, I think that’s what I would start with is coming up with a way for them to be not one-on-one obviously, because I still want there to be two people interviewing one person, but you’re in a room doing the interview and that’s it. Trying to make everything distraction-free, letting people go at their own pace, not feeling pressure because they hear someone’s on question 10 and they’re on question 5. Really that’s where I would start is kind of that how are interviews set up? What does the actual physical space look like? Because I think sometimes that’s what influences a lot of how they show up in the space is what is the space, if that makes sense?
Noah Montague:
Yeah, it does. And I think that is one of the biggest things that I would want to change too in the process that I run with my students in the leadership program that I run as well as just RA interviews in general. It is complicated when the physical space is limiting and what is the alternative as far as finding… How do we set that up to be the most equitable space, which then gets into universities not being designed to be the most equitable spaces for folks to be a part of, which then continues into the recruitment process that they’re at this institution where we’re at, there is not a building that has enough rooms to do all the interviews at the same time on the same floor at the same time. That just does not exist.
Mathew Perry:
I don’t want to be the type of person being like, “Oh, meet me at the front of the building. You’re going to room two something and the next person’s going to room three something.” It’s just not the most logistically feasible.
Noah Montague:
No, but no limit figuring out what that would look like and creating a space where students could all be in an individual room. I would definitely do that. I think no limit whatsoever doing whatever… I think we know collectively that students learn differently and interview differently and need different things in those spaces. If there was a way to fairly and equitably have the process look a little bit different for each student based on what they need, I would love that. What that would look like, I think that’s maybe five different podcast episodes. That’s what that might look like, but knowing that students learn differently, it makes sense that they would in theory, need to be interviewed a little bit differently to be the most successful.
Mathew Perry:
Or going back to what we were saying earlier, they’re coming to the job for different reasons.
Noah Montague:
Yep, so they would need different things. But what exactly that would look like is hard and I think that’s why I wanted to ask that because it’s a nuanced and complicated question. Because there is no answer.
Mathew Perry:
Yeah, because truthfully, if we scrapped our interview process and totally started over… If we’re talking with restrictions and with what we’ve got, logistically I think it would still look pretty similar to what we’re currently doing.
Noah Montague:
It would probably be the same thing again.
Mathew Perry:
I was at lunch yesterday with someone from a different institution whose kind of also in charge of recruitment and stuff, and they brought up this point that I liked, truthfully I’ve never even thought of, and I think it’s because our campuses are a little different. They’ve done away with application essays. They’ve now moved towards student or want to move towards student submitting application videos because they have a higher international population and they don’t want the essays to be a blockade for them to get the job.
We don’t necessarily have that issue at the moment, but I also thought it was super interesting because that was something that I didn’t necessarily ever think of. I mean generally speaking, our essays are not make or break for application to get an interview. We don’t really cut a lot of people between application to interview. Really, it’s just like if there’s a super big red flag in their essays, that’s why they get cut, otherwise you’re making it to the interview.
But if we start getting more and more applications like we have been, we’re going to have to start looking at making cuts before interviews because physically we can do about three to 400 interviews and if we get 600 applications, either the process is going to have to go on longer, which God help me if it does, or we’re just going to have to cut people and tell them we’re sorry your essays weren’t good enough. You’re not getting an interview. And that sucks. These three very simple essays are what kept you from even interviewing for an RA job.
Noah Montague:
And that’s hard.
Mathew Perry:
So we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet, but if we keep going the trajectory we’re going… Pat on the back to me and [inaudible 00:31:01], I think we’re doing a great job, but eventually we might get there.
Noah Montague:
And then adapting to the student population and the situation at hand in some ways takes priority over some other spaces. Well, I guess then Perry, for my last question for you today, and you’ve talked about a lot of different advice and kind of touched on a lot of these things, but what might be, if you had to give one tangible piece of evidence to residence life staff members working in recruitment and building that space in the way that you have in your time here, what might be a piece of tangible advice that you would give to staff trying to make their processes more inclusive, more equitable?
Mathew Perry:
I think the biggest thing is just knowing your student population. RAs everywhere are diverse and yes, you have to generalize something sometimes. Yes, we don’t like to do it, but we got to do it sometimes. And so I think just getting the understanding of what makes the most sense at your university, what is going to be that make or break thing that could potentially catapult you to the next level of recruitment or it could potentially bury you. For us, I think when we were looking at things, I think it was the thing that I think was transformative lately has been the way that we don’t…
You don’t get to see the scores of the people anymore. You have to go off of what they said during their interviews. You’re not hiring someone based off of the fact that they got a perfect score. They are still in that top 10%, so they do get a job, but you don’t know that they scored perfectly. You just have to read what they said, so you’re actually hiring someone for what they said during their interview, not just because someone circled a three instead of a two. Which I think… I mean, we got a lot of pushback on, which is fine. Sometimes you got to make decisions that some people hate and some people really enjoy. Some people really hated it and told us, they were just like, “I think this is the worst thing that you’ve done.” And we took that feedback and unfortunately don’t agree. We think it actually kind of helped people really look more into the student as a person compared to the student as a number, which I think in recruitment processes sometimes can get lost.
Noah Montague:
Especially when there’s 300 plus candidates or 500, 600 depending on the size of the institution you’re at.
Mathew Perry:
Right.
Noah Montague:
I think that example… Because Perry and I work at the same school and that instance, I watched that get very negative feedback and at first I was unsure about it. I was like, this is interesting. And I found myself reading the notes significantly more than I had in previous years.
Mathew Perry:
Some people were like-
Noah Montague:
[inaudible 00:34:14] I liked were actually the candidates that I liked.
Mathew Perry:
Some people used to just be like, “Oh, that’s the highest score on this list that I’m trying to pick up. That’s who I’m going to take.” And guess what? Sometimes they’re the worst RA. They’re the worst RA period. They’re the worst RA for your building because every building is different. So you got to hire the people that are going to make sense in your building. Or they’re the worst RA for you as a supervisor because you also have to keep… I think that’s the one that people lose the most, is that you’re going to be working with these people. Keep how you function as a supervisor into account when you’re hiring. I, myself, am not a type A person at all, 0% type A. And you know what? I’m working on it kind of, not really, but-
Noah Montague:
You own it though. You own it though.
Mathew Perry:
And I tell my RAs that upfront. I’m like, “Listen, I’m not type A. I struggle supervising type A people.” I tell them, because I do. I’m very much laissez type of person, loosey goosey, whatever you want to say. I’m very much [inaudible 00:35:25] like, here’s your end goal. Go do it. Rather than be like, here are your steps to do this thing. And so I tell them upfront. If this is what you need, I can do it, but perhaps I am not the best boss. And I think when I’m doing hiring, I keep that into consideration. If someone in their essays is literally like, “I really like a lot of structure.” That’s probably not the best person.
Noah Montague:
And doing the process in the way that we did it invited you and me and our entire team to really read into these candidates and figure out who we’re actually hiring. And I think that in and of itself makes the process more equitable because you’re actually getting to know the people behind the piece of paper in front of you, out of the 300 plus candidates on the sheet, knowing who we’re looking at, I think comes with that process. With that Perry, that about wraps up our time together today. Thank you so much for joining me. Did you have good time?
Mathew Perry:
Of course. Thank you for having me.
Noah Montague:
You are made for a podcast, so I-
Mathew Perry:
And I hope everyone enjoyed my voice.
Noah Montague:
We appreciate you having here, and thank you all for joining us for today’s episode of ResEdChat. If you have an idea or a topic or a person that you would like to have on the show, please let us know by reaching out for Roompact. But for now, take care of yourselves and enjoy the rest of your day.
Mathew Perry:
Or if you want me back.
Noah Montague:
Or if you want Perry back, let us know. Bye for now, folks.
